Just a quick update for anyone else who's interested in completely removing the minimap.

So it's fairly easy to get rid of everything except the text (the med count and the distance to objective). I made the health and armor bars transparent but you could make them completely invisible just as easily. Not being able to remove the text entirely I made it about 50% brightness to it's less annoying.

Unfortunately the big circle of terrain height rendering is still there. I just went back to the world map files from fc3_main and tried making them completely invisible instead of 50% opacity. I saved them all as DXT1 with 1-bit alpha (so, on or off, nothing in between). What I found is that, while this didn't create the performance problems that 50% alpha DXT5 did, it still had no impact on the minimap at all. The full world map was invisible at all zoom levels but the minimap was intact.

So obviously these world map images aren't what the minimap uses. It can't even be the software adjusting the alpha itself because I actually made all of the files 4x4 pixel (smallest possible DDS size) black squares, so even if it had set the opacity back to 100% it would have been all black. I'm still hunting for the images the minimap actually uses, no luck so far (of course it seems the extractor is currently only able to grab the filenames of 50% of the files, so this may become more obvious eventually).

*Update: The minimap is put together from ~12000 9kb .xbt's which are currently being dumped into the unknown pile from fc3_main.dat.
I can try making them 50% opacity like I originally did with the world map, but considering how horribly it reacted I'm thinking it might not be worth it. And my Photoshop macro takes 3 minutes to do 500 files, so I expect this would take... well about an hour. Not that terrible.

Instead I'm going to make a single 4x4 pixel 0 opacity DXT1 DDS file. Then I'll write some code to open each original file, grab the header and filename, and then paste that + the blank DDS into a new file with the same name. The good news is that the world map should be totally untouched.

If everything works I'll pack it into a patch.dat/fat, and I can upload a zip of the files themselves if anyone else wants to include no minimap into their mod. My understanding is that as long as I leave them in the unknown directory with their original crazy filenames the packing process will work even though their real paths and filenames aren't available, hopefully that's correct.

Mission accomplished. Minimap removed entirely, left the health bar at like 20% opacity. Should have turned the text 50% grey (and will before I post the patch.dat/fat files) but here's a shot:

There are other options available here. For example I could leave some of the icons at any level of opacity even without the big terrain rendering. Or you could put the health bar's opacity back up. Or remove it entirely. The text, as I said, is a mystery to me for now aside from changing its color.

Here's the basic version. This includes the following changes:
-Everything is now gone from the minimap. No icons, no terrain rendering, nothing's left. The world map is unchanged.
-Health bar is about 40% opacity (it's more visible than the screenshot above). Same for the armor bar.
-The health packs remaining text is no longer white, instead a neutral grey. I couldn't figure out how to make it disappear entirely without introducing a blank font.
-The distance to waypoint text is unchanged. I couldn't find this in any .FEU file, and even if I did the best I could do is make it a different color.

I might make some other variations if anyone's interested. For example I could put some of the icons back, or make a version with no health/armor bars at all. More importantly feel free to use what I did in your own mod. The files to get rid of the terrain rendering are in _UNKNOWN/gfx, there are 12801 of them and they're 1kb each (9kb if you go get them from your own fc3_main.dat). You also want the transparent "unknown" and "underground" minimap textures in ui\singleplayer\textures\hud\minimap (this is also where you find the textures for the fill on the health/armor bars).